"I was silent during
the trial on advice of counsel and that
was a miracle," she told a crowd of 1,500
at Temple Beth Am Sunday night. The Emory
University professor, part of the
synagogue's Library Minyan while she
taught at UCLA, will not be silent again.

Lipstadt roared out her story last
weekend in the first public assessment of
her five-year legal fight which ended
April 11 in victory in a British court
when Judge Charles Gray threw out a
spurious libel case brought against her by
notorious Holocaust-denier David
Irving. In her 1994 book
"Denying the
Holocaust," Lipstadt had called him
"one of the most dangerous spokespersons
for Holocaust denial;" he sued her for
ruining his reputation as a historian.

In recounting the verdict, her voice,
serene only while reading the
emotion-laden letters of gratitude from
survivors around the world, is the
inflamed voice of the Witness. Otherwise,
she imbues her story with a rapid,
breathless barrage of detail, filling her
audience with all the circumstance,
consequence and connection regarding the
verdict that you can bear. It is something
to hear.

As one who has known Lipstadt over the
years, I was struck by the physical toll
the trial has taken on her. She appears
weakened and shrunk, her black silk
pantsuit several sizes too big. Now I
understand the dreadful news photos of her
victory; despite her thumbs-up victory, it
is the hollowed eyes of a Dinah that tells
the tale.

In her ashen pallor, her
inadvertent interior monologues
(as if addressing history) as
well as a body ravaged by stress,
Lipstadt reminds me of no one so
much as Elie Wiesel, in
the first years when he was
called to testify. Just as
Wiesel, too, at first left his
audiences behind, it will take
years for others of us to catch
up.

Pointing to the 355-page
decision by Judge Gray, which she
carries in a shiny red plastic
binder, Lipstadt declares, "We
won decisively."

By "we" of course she
means:

Lipstadt
reminds me of no one so much as
Elie Wiesel, in the first years
when he was called to testify. .
.

The victims of the Shoah, both the
dead and the survivors.

The innocent non-Jewish bystanders
and witnesses, shamed by and needing
atonement from the 20th century's
cruelest outrages.

Those legion of legitimate
historians who serve both truth and
memory by cataloguing the past.

"He sued me," she says, "because I was
a woman, a Jewish woman, an American
Jewish woman. He thought I would crumple
and fold and give up."

He didn't know who he was dealing with.
In 1983, long before publication of
"Beyond Belief" and "Denying the
Holocaust" would establish her career as a
moral conscience of American Jewish
memory, Lipstadt, then an assistant
professor at UCLA in Jewish Studies,
foreshadowed her role in the community.
She contributed "And Deborah Made Ten" to
Susannah Heschel's anthology, "On
Being a Jewish Feminist," in which she
described her pain and pleasure in finally
being counted in the minyan for her
father's yahrtzeit. "You see, they needed
me for the minyan," she wrote. "Yes, they
needed me."

And they -- we -- need her now.

Let us talk about what Lipstadt's
verdict against David Irving is not about.
As Lipstadt herself told me, "It is not a
victory to prove the Holocaust
happened."

"The
Holocaust is a fact. There are not two
sides to the evidence." Lipstadt is still
burning over the Los Angeles Times Page
One story about her trial last winter
which gave Irving's view of the Shoah
numbers equal status.

"He danced on the graves of victims,"
Lipstadt said. "He inflated numbers and
made immoral equivalencies," comparing
those who died in the air war on Dresden
(right) to
those who died in death camps.

Moreover, the trial was "not a victory
over hate."

"Every generation has its haters," she
said. "You can win the victory but never
the war."

Finally, hers is not necessarily a
victory for free speech. It is a victory
for free, responsible speech, for the
capacity of sane, scientific argument to
trump lies.

Lipstadt laid out the Perry
Mason-style trap she and her
litigators laid for Irving. By analyzing
his writings on non-Jewish subjects over
30 years, including tracing his empty and
misleading footnotes, they were able to
trap Irving in his own methods. Hoist, as
they say, on his own petard.

In such a painstaking way, at great
personal cost, was justice done.

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